Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industry? 519
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes at the Columbia Journalism Review that global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. "Taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts," writes Rosenwald. "Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
One can only hope so.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
Good riddance. The Internet is shit because of ad-sponsored content and SEO.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
Worst part? They'll never realize they killed themselves.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
So many industries are this way. They assume that there is a captive audience with only a few malcontents, but over time it starts slipping away and they don't know how to cope. Like television, they decide to save money by having crappier unscripted content or hire only interns as script writers, then are baffled that people are cutting the cord.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
See any retail industry. Anywhere.
Quite frankly, if I go to a bookstore to get information about books and what I get is an employee who knows less about books than me and turns to her computer to search Amazon for recommendations... I can do that myself, thank you! I was hoping that I'd find somewhere there who, ya know, KNOWS a thing about the shit they sell?
That's the whole point behind going into a specialized store instead of doing your shopping online. To talk with someone who knows MORE about the stuff than you do, or you could find out by using the internet. That is the whole point.
But of course, people who actually know what they're doing cost more money, so what you get is people who sell you mattresses today, books tomorrow and in a week you see them flipping burgers.
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And what happens when they hire someone motivated (and thus expensive), and you then buy the actual book at Amazon anyway after getting the info you need?
Bookstores are simply outdat
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I know a lot about books. I read pretty much non stop and have for 56 years. The only job I ever got fired from was in a book store. I could not even tear the covers off returns (paperbacks) without falling into reading them. This may be why you do not find avid readers working in book stores that expect to make a profit.
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Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Advertisers, Figure out how to do ads in a trustworthy way (i.e. no privacy invasive behavior tracking and little or no risk of malware exposure) and I'll be happy to allow those ads. I'd prefer the ads to be static HTML hosted within the site I visit. I don't want my browser touching 15 domains that all run scripts every time I visit a page. As long as ads compromise my privacy and security I will consider advertising networks the enemy and treat them accordingly.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
Running NoScript; it boggles my mind how many domains are required to get some sites working (particularly MSM sites). Sometimes I just give up on trying to access the content.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Advertisers, Figure out how to do ads in a trustworthy way (i.e. no privacy invasive behavior tracking and little or no risk of malware exposure) and I'll be happy to allow those ads. I'd prefer the ads to be static HTML hosted within the site I visit. I don't want my browser touching 15 domains that all run scripts every time I visit a page. As long as ads compromise my privacy and security I will consider advertising networks the enemy and treat them accordingly.
A co-worker asked which browser I used at home.
Firefox I replied.
Now many add-ons?
About 30.
Your favorite?
Ad block plus.
You know that's how the sites make money.
I know.
Why use it then?
When the sites start paying a portion of my Internet bill for them using my bandwidth I'll quit using ad block.
Nuff said.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find pathetic is that these companies, oftentimes the source of the most abusive and invasive software on the Internet, call themselves the victims when people just block their garbage.
It has gotten so bad, that in the last 10 years, it is quite obvious that the #1 defense against malware on a computer is not a firewall, nor is it an AV program. It is an adblocking extension coupled with some form of click to play or NoScript. In fact, if a user doesn't run anything downloaded, adblock/noscript/updated browser/firewall is pretty much all they need for adequate security.
Of course, iOS/Android tend to not be that better. Half the time, you find sites trying to shunt over to the App Store for some brain-dead F2P/P2W clone of Candy Crush or junk like that. Using Dolphin Browser on Android does help with this.
The problem isn't the ads. Plain old static banner ads did work. Google text ads are useful. The actual problem is greed. The banner ads were replaced by tower ads, content was moved from one page and broken up into 5-30 pages. Hyperlinks were replaced by mouseovers. Even photos are broken up requiring 4-5 pages to see the entire pithy meme.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:4, Informative)
You've got your decades confused. There were no ads online in the late 80s or early 90s, unless you're talking about Prodigy, because no one outside of academia used the internet then, and the WWW and the Mosaic browser didn't even exist until 1994. Looking at a .gif (JPEG didn't even come out until 1992, and didn't see real usage on regular people's computers until later) meant manually downloading it first (perhaps from alt.binaries.pictures.*), then opening up an image viewer to look at it. The internet didn't really get commercialized with ads until the late 90s.
There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with ad on the margins of the page. Slashdot has three up right now and they don't block my view of the content, they aren't playing music or videos (chewing up my bandwidth), and nothing opened a popup. Those are Ads in the tradition of a news paper.
The Fucking Ads are the opposite. They block the content, force you to find that little X in some corner...if they didn't put a fake one in that's just a link to another page. Fucking Ads seem to be loaded first. So if some Ad service has shit slow servers, it takes forever for a simple Text article to appear. Fucking Ads also hijack random clicks. Ever click on a page to be sure the scroll is focused on the page and not something else so you can use the scroll wheel...and here comes a popup.
Fucking Ads are also dangerous. To get rid of them you have to interact with them. Who knows what the fuck will happen when you click that close button?
So if they just stick to what they've been doing for the last 200 years, we're fine.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Informative)
a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's even worse is ad content in the main body of the document that spends about five to ten seconds after a page load changing its size, so that the text of the document is bouncing all over the place as AJAX-loaded images size themselves to whatever is viewed as the correct size. If you don't basically walk away for about thirty seconds, you'll end up trying to click on a link, click on the wrong link and end up in some other page than you wanted.
The sheer incompetence of web design, even on major sites like the Guardian's website, just amazes me. We literally have taken the latest web tools, and found a way to make the web experience even worse than it was during those purgatorial days of Internet Explorer 6.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Informative)
a lot of page loads are slowed by ads because the ads are bid and filled in real time. You click on a link, your deets are passed thru to the ad server (IP, operating system, mobile or desktop, etc, whatever the browser sends), ad server auctions off your eyeballs. The auction window is left open as long as people can stand it in order to maximize bids.
I never understood that "fact".
I work on the real-time bidding part (the DSP part - the ones buying), and we have a fixed window to bid. There's no variability anywhere, if we bid too late (and that's measured in milliseconds), we automatically lose.
So none of the exchanges I work with act like that, and I work with many of the big names. I'm surprised it made the news.
Furthermore, there's no technical reason (and the means are way too cumbersome) to force said sequential loading. If anything, I'd blame the browsers for:
1. Piss-poor and snail-slow JS compilers
2. Lacking compile caches (or if they have them, slow as fuck)
3. Bad parallelization
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Interesting)
Fucking Ads pop up over my content and, on my tablet, display a close button just off screen, so I can go no further.
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I have no problem with ad on the margins of the page. Slashdot has three up right now and they don't block my view of the content, they aren't playing music or videos (chewing up my bandwidth), and nothing opened a popup.
I have "Ads disabled" checked on /. and I'm getting headline banner ads that actively rotate (chewing up bandwidth and CPU), a small add at the top of the right column (right above the "ads disabled" option), and another ad below that option.
And just prior to coming to this article, the main page of /. got covered up by a full-page popup grocery ad for Fred Meijer, which had NO obvious way of making it go away. That ad came from a rollover when my cursor touched the top headine ad, which hadn't yet loade
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "disable advertising" checkbox has never made much sense. If you're reading Slashdot, you ought to be using an adblocker anyway
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't block them for the longest time because I was willing to look at the dumb ads as the price of free content I enjoy. I gave up and clicked the checkbox when Slashdot's ads went full jackass, and installed ABP when Slashdot (temporarily?) stopped honoring the checkbox. Yes, that's right: I installed ABP because of Slashdot.
Slow golf clap. Well done, corporate overlords.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Funny)
We need a new poll: WHEN did ads on /. cause you to install an ad blocker?
* 1997-2001
* 2002-2006
* 2007-2010
* 2011-2013
* 2014-2015
* Not yet!
* CowboyNeal personally installed my adblocker in 1996.
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The "disable advertising" checkbox has never made much sense. If you're reading Slashdot, you ought to be using an adblocker anyway
Not just that but it's not like you get the sidebar space back if you disable ads, you just get a big white space reminding you that you've disabled ads. Thanks! I knew that. I run an ad blocker.
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And funny coincidence, today my "ad block" option is UNset and I can click on it but it won't stay set.
Thanks slashdot.
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I don't want to see them in the margins either - that is MY bandwidth that is being stolen. If they refuse to show the content if I don't view the ads, then that is ok with me and it is easy enough to do. But to passively suck up my bandwidth is unacceptable, no matter how desparate the site owners are to make a few bucks so that they can quit their day job.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. When I visit sites on the internet, I don't expect to see ads. That is the default state of the internet. It wasn't until little sleazeballs like you jumped into our world and started filling it with ads. Fuck you, go back to where you came from and get the fuck off of my internet.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I hope models like Patreon catch on enough to provide an alternative that is better for everyone, supporting artists directly and eliminating the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
I hope cable TV catches on, because subscriptions will eliminate the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
Oh, sorry, the adholes just pushed their crap onto cable subscribers, too, until it became as bad as over-the-air TV but you had to pay for it, too.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. If the creator of the web site does not want to me watch with adblock on then they can say so and I will never go back to their site. I don't need to see them, they are not vital to my life. But their third party advertising partner is slowing down my internet and slowing down my computer if I turn off adblock. The content creator needs to find a better way to make a living than to associate with scum advertisers.
Who are these content creators? Why is AT&T showing me ads when I use AT&T's web mail when I pay then $50 a month? Why would you defend such actions? Are the bloggers? Screw them, they should get a job instead of relying on me; and I don't read blogs anyway.
I am not using adblock because I want to be a freeloader. I am using adblock because ads are actively hostile to me and my computer, they introduce malware and slow down my computer. Too many ads on TV and I cut the cord; no ads, less cost, more actual paid content.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Interesting)
This. Very this.
One of the chess sites detects if the ads don't load, and sends nasty emails threatening to delete your account if you block ads. That is their right, just as blocking ads until they ban me is my right. That is just the give-and-take of Freedom.
I didn't wait to get banned, or unblock the ads, I just switched to a different site. The best chess site doesn't have ads and is membership only; none of the free-to-access ones are worth paying for, or worth crying over if they fail to make money off of a "free" service.
I spend lots of money at the stores I shop at, but they aren't ones that have large advertising budgets. And if blogs-for-profit all go bust... honestly the content quality will skyrocket. Way less noise, even if the signal appears smaller in the short term.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Releasing something for free on the internet does not guarantee you a right to profit. I would think by your low user id you would have got this very basic fact by now.
Advertising is cancer. It warps the mind to consume, causes needy people, mental problems and over-consumption. Something we cannot afford in this new century. Advertising wastes, time, money, bandwidth and fills peoples heads with garbage. Advertising should be banned. Its nothing more than for profit mind control.
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Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll disagree with you on one thing. While no ISP or OS vendor should be the one making and imposing the choice to block on behalf of the customers; in the case of a company, said company IS the customer and has every right and, I'd argue, responsibility to block ads.
In a company environment, the bandwidth doesn't belong to the users, nor does the equipment. It belongs to the company. And remember, web ads are a fairly common vector for malware infection. They can also be bandwidth and CPU hogs. As such, it is a fairly responsible practice to block them with a proxy or at the gateway, even if you're otherwise pretty liberal about what you allow your users to do online. Hardly anyone will miss them. And if some users do have a legitimate business need to view the unfiltered web, advertising, tracking cookies, malware, and all; accommodations can be made in those cases.
Re:There are Ads and then there are Fucking Ads. (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my biggest peeves these days is the imposition of artificial pagination upon the reader as though the web were some nasty old newspaper or an elementary-school slideshow... just to artificially jack up the fucking ad impressions that much more. Combine that with the stupid javascript and HTML5 tricks that are en vogue these days and many sites are all but unusable on mobile browsers.
I too actually never minded banner ads at the top or bottom of the page. I do understand that content has to be paid for. Hell, I don't even mind targeted advertising, so long as it's well-targetd, not insulting (Looking at you, Facebook, on this one for continuing to suggest that I should like things like bill gates, samsung, and walmart.), and not obnoxious... so basically... Google AdSense.
I even whitelist some sites I do want to support. But the first time I see shenanigans... flash, java, pop-ups, pop-unders, overlays, interstitials, sounds, auto-playing video, or the aforementioned stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks... I have zero qualms whatsoever about immediately going back to blocking everything.
Re:Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industr (Score:4, Interesting)
I dislike the intrusive ads, but someone has to pay for good, insightful comment and reporting. I am willing to pay about $365 p.a. for unencumbered access to newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. I am not willing to pay $10 p.m. for every single one of these; especially to only read any article very occasionally or only once (I can't afford multiple thousand $s per year!).
Should the biggies (Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Nature, The Economist, etc.) get together and set up such a system, I'm sure most of the rest would follow.
But: would anyone else pay?
Hopefully, yes... (Score:3)
You know what? The internet was better/more informative/easier to use/more interesting/etc. etc. etc. before all these pay by ad sites started springing up. If they all go away, I don't see the problem.
Re:Hopefully, yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, the internet was paid for by paying for the internet itself; subscriptions to ISPs, building out infrastructure, etc. Today coporations want you to pay for the internet AND pay for the crappy content too, and they want to have you pay in order to receive the ads since they're not reimbursing you for all those unnecessary downloads. Even worse on a mobile phone as you can incur big penalties if you use more data than your plan allows, so the ads slow the network and drain your wallet.
At which point someone on slashdot pops in and says "you're all a bunch of worthless freeloaders, if you want to look at my glorious blog about hamster farming then you have to look at these ads about Buicks so that I can buy a better microphone for my hamster podcast."
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Yup, the internet was paid for by paying for the internet itself
Yeah, the network is supposed to be paid for by your internet subscription. The "problem" is that the Internet isn't like a Cable subscription. Part of your Internet payment doesn't go to the content providers. Without content the Internet would be pretty useless, and you have to pay for the content somehow. Sorry, ads are a necessary thing.
My problem with them is that they have become overly aggressive. Pop-ups, ads with sound, ads you can't close, paging through 12 pages to read on paragraph of tex
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If the content providers don't care enough about their viewers to stop using aggressive advertisers and continue to use advertising networks instead of curating their own ads, then I don't care about those content providers. If they respect their viewers fairly and treat them as something other than revenue sources then their viewers will respect them in return.
Right now there are so many abusive ad networks that it's impossible to separate the millions of bad actors from the two or three good guys. It's
Re:Hopefully, yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more than that.
Why the fuck should we accept being constantly tracked by dozens of analytic companies as a price of using the web?
When there's 15 or 20 trackers in addition to ads in every page, the only reasonable response is to block the hell out of all of this crap.
It's none of score card research's fucking business what sites I visit. Nor it it Facebook's business. Nor is it any of the dozens of other companies I've blocked with privacy extensions.
This idea that self entitled corporations are entitled to all of this information about us is complete bullshit.
In the real world it would be like a retailer implanting a tracking chip in you when you walked in the store.
I don't care about anybody's damned analytics. And as much as I can, I'll block everything which isn't the content I'm there to see.
The revenue model isn't my damned problem. My privacy is.
And I'm not giving that away to some asshole marketer who wants to optimize his synergies.
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I have used the Composer component to create HTML that I have put on my web site.
Takes a lot to be able to admit to something like that.
Ad Blocking (Score:5, Insightful)
I installed ad blocker this year, and its for mainly one reason: video ads. Since these have become popular, it eats up my bandwidth and starts playing ridiculously loud sound even when I don't click on it. If anyone is too blame for the rise of ad blocking technology its advertisers.
Re:Ad Blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Last time I used a VM without ad-blocking, it seemed almost every page I visited had ads that started talking or playing music. About ten minutes into browsing on a popular social network site, the VM got nailed by scareware, apparently through a hole in a browser add-on.
The real life example is people offering you newspapers for free if you open the door and listen to a sales pitch... but then some newspaper companies started having a percentage of their salesperson hold the people at gunpoint and do a home invasion, so the smarter people just don't open the door.
Re:Ad Blocking (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you keep putting up your No Solicitors sign then you will hurt the door-to-door shake-down industry. We need your dollars because we we like money, so won't you please take down your No Solicitors sign before we resort to harsher measures?"
Same here (Score:5, Insightful)
I am willing to play fair and tolerate some advertising, but it finally got too invasive and so I got adblock. I am fine with ads, but only so long as they don't disturb me using the web. No autoplay video/audio, no popups, no interstitial. When they start pulling that crap, well sorry but I'm going to have to opt out. If it kills a site off, too bad, maybe you shouldn't have been so annoying.
Advertisers are going to have to learn to keep it reasonable if they want me to stop using adblocking. As it stands now I block by default and only whitelist sites I know aren't bad about it.
Its not ajust a right, its a security issue,. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad networks profligate malware, as a result an ad blocking isn't just to block an annoyance, its to protect myself from a drive by download of a flash powered/explioted malware that takes over my system and ransoms it back to me. Ad blockers are the new anti-virus.
Meh. Fuck em (Score:5, Interesting)
auto start video ads and popup ads that popup about on web pages 30 seconds after you start reading an article are my 2 least favorite ad types.
Fuck em
Re:Meh. Fuck em (Score:4, Interesting)
That's one way to look at it. Here is another perspective [mondaynote.com]:
Re:Meh. Fuck em (Score:4, Insightful)
I have ghostery on my browser. it shows for each web page how many trackers are being blocked. I've seen many sites with 12+ different trackers.
Re:Meh. Fuck em (Score:4, Insightful)
auto start video ads and popup ads that popup about on web pages 30 seconds after you start reading an article are my 2 least favorite ad types.
One recent experience. Open up a review site. Like 15 seconds in, it pops up a center ad: "Do you like this article? Recommend it on XYZ*!!!" Dude, I might read fast, but I haven't even seen a complete paragraph!
One site asked for me to review something. I gave it 1 star for the popup.
*Facebook/twitter/yadayadayada
Re:Meh. Fuck em (Score:5, Informative)
I look over coworkers shoulders sometimes when we're working on something, and I'm always surprised to see so many ads. Ie, someone has the same email provider I do from our ISP and it's chock full of ads I never see. From an ISP service we *PAY* for. That's ridiculous; I'm paying $50/month so why should they be subsidizing themselves with ridiculous randomized ads?
If you don't want me to read your paper for free (Score:2)
don't show all the pages with the articles stuck to your shops window.
More inbounds to a free article (Score:2)
I think some sites make their articles available without charge with ads because paywalled articles are less likely to get cited in other publications.
I don't mind ads, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't mind ads, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, my response to their begging me to disable my ad-blocker for their site is that I DO have ad-blocks 'non-intrusive ad whitelist' enabled, they can serve me ads so long as they meet those standards.
Oh, they're not as 'effective'? They're more effective than ads that drive me to block them!
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Betteridge says "No"... (Score:3)
Ad blockers aren't; ads are. (Score:5, Insightful)
When ads stop playing sound, hijacking the page, redirecting me to app stores, acting as hovertraps ("Oh! You briefly moused over our ad! Let's take up the whole screen and play loud sounds!"), eating all my computer's resources, and distributing malware - then, and only then, I'll look into not using adblockers.
Web-ad-serving companies complaining about ad blockers are like grade-school bullies, crying to the teacher about "So-and-so punched me back!" They keep escalating their 'services', and are acting surprised that people aren't just taking it.
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The ironic thing is that Google has done extremely well with their quiet text ads. Apple has done well with their relatively unobtrusive iAd platform.
The problem is that nobody cares to fix this problem:
The ad slingers can play three-monkeys when bad guys use their networks for malvertising, then they whine when people block their stuff. They have zero accountability. If, instead of malware, it was infringing IP, said ad servers would be out of business immediately.
It is easy to blame the "evil adblocker
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I have no problem if sites block me from viewing them when they detect adblock. It's only fair. If they depend upon ads to make a living then I can go elsewhere. I'd much prefer this model in fact as I can more easily avoid any site that treats me as a wallet with eyeballs.
The thing I don't understand with the ad business (Score:5, Insightful)
It's extremely clear that most everybody hates ads with a passion - else why would so many people install ad blockers eh?
So even if ad blockers were to disappear tomorrow, what makes advertisers feel that forcing ads down the throat of people who hate them increase sales for their customers?
To me, it seems that either people hate ads, block them and won't buy the shit being advertised, or people hate ads, can't block them and won't buy the shit being advertised regardless.
Worse, forcing people to see ads they don't want to see may very well antagonize them. Me, when I see an ad that gets through my ad blockers, I remember the product as something I'll make extra sure I'll never, ever buy.
So what's the business model here? I can't believe enough people actually like ads to make online advertising a viable business proposition...
Re:The thing I don't understand with the ad busine (Score:5, Insightful)
You're making one fundamental logical mistake.
The advertising industry exists to sell ads. It does not exist to sell the things they're advertising.
They don't care whether it works. They care that people pay them to push ads.
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But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
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But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
If that was true, companies would have stopped buying ads on cable TV decades ago.
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You've only got yourselves to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
I made the mistake of opening a link to a games website in IE not long ago and ended up having to kill it because it brought the browser to its knees. I opened it in Chrome with Disconnect and click to play Flash and it loaded pretty much instantly. You made your bed and then shit in it as well. Don't complain about having to lie in it now.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe the spammers will eventually get the message (Score:2)
Speaking for myself: I don't want ads, I want the content I asked for. Stick your ads up your arse.
Answer... (Score:2)
No, but it is a lovely thought...
Stop it, Ad blockers aren't evil. (Score:3)
I think someday we'll look back today like we do to 1998 webpages. We'll go,"They really tried to slap you with an ad before you read some goon's pointless article that was hyped?" I don't think ads should or will go away, but I think they should be more responsible. Commit to who you want to advertise with, don't just run an adnetwork. Do you really want to put nefarious ads on things kids might be reading? Well you might be doing that if you run a generic adnetwork. Sadly I don't think people will become more responsible with advertisements. I see them becoming more obnoxious because they're greedy for the monies.
Now this last thing is a pet random idea: Actually I think if you wanted to really get a huge ad based network, you should build a pyramid scheme where no one loses anything. Use the gameshow model so they're playing a game of any level of skill, but they share ad revenue with you. At the end of the month with a raffle where they get points by doing well in the game + 50% additional tickets from everyone they referred and 25% tickets from people they referred etc... People would get a portion of the ad revenue by playing the game. And they'd get additional tickets by just watching ads. Get people wanting to watch the ads for their own profit, and you have a gold mine. If I'm not getting anything for watching your ad, its just wasting my time at best. At worst, my computer is getting crypto locked with ransom ware.
I run adblock. And yes, I'd download a car if I could.
Re: (Score:3)
Why should a newly established web site do this? I'm serious. Is there some sort of inherent concept that a new web site must be profitable and that profit must come from ads?
What sort of new web site is this? If it's a blog then screw it, if they won't post their stupid ideas without being paid for it, then they can just not have a blog. If they blog could be better with donations then ask for donations instead of screwing the viewers with ads. Oh, but donations are rare and don't cover all the costs
It will adapt (Score:2)
Unlike giant, rusty conglomerates (such as members of the RIAA), small studios that rely on advertising will adapt--they'll have to, or they'll die. Many already have, using services like Kickstarter and Patreon to run campaigns for funding. Digital content sites have long had stores to purchase physical goods, using profit from that as (partial) funding.
Companies that offer subscriptions in addition to ad-supported revenue will likely lock down more of their content behind the subscription, offering scraps
as soon as you start (Score:3, Informative)
displaying static, unobtrusive, low bandwidth unanimated ads that do not track us, are served from the same domain as the web page it's displayed on, are presented below the fold, are not misleading, link to unobfuscated urls vetted by trusted third-parties to be safe, and are constantly monitored malicious code, content or redirection.. maybe, just maybe, people will start putting up with online ads again... until then... enjoy my adblock and noscript with a half-dozen years of tuning to their blocklists and whitelists.
So Be It (Score:4, Interesting)
"When in the course of human events...." ads become too onerous, rebellions break out. The "consumers" of news (as if news can be "used up" somehow) are rebelling against too many and too invasive ads.
It was easier to find the information I wanted on the internet before the media companies filled all google's top spots with commercial products instead of the student/hobbyist stuff that was there before.
A Simple Issue (Score:5, Insightful)
A plain ad, with a link to someone's site? That's fine. I'll even read them as I scroll down the page, most times. If it's something I'm interested in, I'll even do a quick search for the product and look at the actual seller's page.
A really, REALLY annoying ad, with autoplay video and sound, popping up and getting in the way of the actual content, and often becoming home to all sorts of security issues like viruses or rogue redirects to trash pages? That's not. That's why I use adblocking software.
Here's a thought, advertisers:
Try spending as much time on creative and entertaining ads as you do in trying to come up with new and more obnoxious pop-ups. That actually works.
Re: (Score:3)
Try spending as much time on creative and entertaining ads as you do in trying to come up with new and more obnoxious pop-ups.
You know, there's an annual advertising gala disguised as a sports event, and a lot of people watch it for the commercials! It is possible to make people want to see your ads, but it takes more effort than bitching about the freeloaders who don't want to punch the monkey.
Interesting conflict (Score:5, Informative)
This is not ok.
I'm willing to chalk up my annoyance with loud flashing pseudo-videos to personal preference, but it seems like everyone else who consumes internet content is also irritated by these things.
Until the ad networks can guarantee (which they can't, now) that they won't deposit malware on my parents' computers, I will evangelize the use of adblockers until I die. Another option, as others have already mentioned, is to bring control of ad content back to the sites' actual owners.
Re: (Score:2)
You miss something important completely: If people install ad-blockers, then they do not want ads and any revenue sites are making are based on invalid assumptions.
Re: (Score:3)
I take a lot of comfort knowing that I'm not uniquely intelligent - and honestly, some of the work-arounds advertisers have come up with for getting around ad blockers are pretty clever. Restructuring how a business works isn
Re: (Score:3)
As soon as you start running somebody elses you're their whore.
Yes. I've seen a number of sites I read regularly, or forums I post to, suddenly cull certain topics because Google or some other ad service tells them those topics are no longer acceptable on their site.
Ads = virus attack vector (Score:3, Interesting)
I could live with ads if they were just annoying, but ad blocking is just commonsense self-defense. Browsing just one site exposes you ads from potentially hundreds of sources, each of which potentially carries as much or more risk of attack as the site you're browsing! It just doesn't make sense to voluntarily expose yourself to that magnitude of increased risk.
Seems like a week doesn't go by without seeing a zero-day advisory along the lines of "observed in the wild being served from XYZ ad network." A lot of attackers no longer bother compromising servers, etc when they can just spend a few $ to almost instantly serve up the targets.
First order of business for advertising networks: fix the security, bandwidth and response times issues. Until then, I won't feel any guilt whatsoever about protecting myself from you.
Tune in next week...Same Bat Time (Score:2)
They're beginning with a false premise (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think ad blockers exist because people don't want ads or "refuse to pay for news." Ad blockers exist because ads have become so ridiculously obnoxious and disruptive with animations or even sound that they make the web pages they're on pretty close to unusable. This is on top of the occasional but still-to-frequent usage of ad networks as malware distribution platforms. If the ad networks set some reasonable standards and actually enforced them, then ad blockers wouldn't be as much of an issue. As it is right now, using an ad block is a security requirement, not an option. From an aesthetic and usability standpoint it's just highly desirable.
The whole ad industry is elaborate fraud (Score:2)
It relies on invalid assumptions. People that block ads are not going to buy things from the blocked ads, ever, even if they were displayed. The industry is lying to its customers, and, as is traditional, fraud of this nature allows its perpetrators to make far more money than any type of honest work. On the other hand, the ad-industry has over-done it to an extreme degree. The success of ad-blocking software shows how intrusive and disrespectful of the user's time and attention it has become. Of course, pe
Intrusive ads (Score:2)
The more intrusive ads get (popups, sounds, unskippable video, high bandwidth use combined with capped connections etc - i especially hate ads with sound), the more likely people are to install ad blockers.
If ads were less intrusive, people would be less inclined to block them.
I installed an ad blocker specifically because of ads which contained sound, especially annoying when you have multiple tabs open and ads rotate so all of a sudden one of your 50 tabs starts making noise and you have to hunt around to
Parasites of the internet (Score:2)
I have seen this argument and always found it incredible. These people who wish to place pop-up ads have neither invented the internet, nor enabled its growth, nor provided useful or beneficial content; and yet they argue that they are the true owners of the Internet who should be able to tax us for its survival, and that to install ad-blocking filters is somehow 'piracy'. There are other, nobler organisations that use advertising in moderation (Google), and others that try to do without (Wikipedia) - I wo
my network, my system, my rules (Score:3)
don't think for one single fucking second that your slimy piece of shit malware infested crappy ad server or the network it resides on has any right to pass so much as a single bit past my firewall.
Don't like it? Choke on a dick and die.
BTW: I block ad's on my phone too, so don't think mobile devices will save you either.
Ads burn 30% of bandwidth that YOU pay for (Score:5, Interesting)
In a recent story, a university installed ad blocking at their edge router. They saw their total Internet usage drop by 30%. Since, they were probably also doing non-web traffic (e.g. software updates, dropbox, etc.), this means that the actual percentage of website content that is ads is probably higher.
Are companies who inject ads going to compensate the recipient for the bandwidth usage? Will such usage push the subscriber over their datacap?
I installed ad blocking early, because, back then, the flash video ad was more likely to hang the flash player.
And, I used to have a datacap [Note: I'm in California, and I switched to sonic.net, one of the few ISPs that have no datacap], but now the load time with the ads would still be too great.
And, I'm not against ads in general, but, the privilege [of sending me an ad] has been abused. Obnoxiousness, malware vector, delaying page load until the ad is dynamically selected in a back haul bidding network. The list just keeps going.
They killed their own goose, not the blockers (Score:3)
W/O advertiser restraint, ad blocking inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently, ads:
1) Interrupt my flow of thought.
2) Use video, which eats my limited bandwidth (Some of us use hotspots with data limits, comprende?)
3) Unexpectedly start creating sounds, interrupting my wife, the cat, myself and the children.
4) And the very worse thing, the godamm ads start JUMPING MY PAGE AROUND so the thing I was trying to click is no longer there by the time my mouse/finger manage to click the screen and I've suddenly opened the ad for hot singles in my area (The wife just loves that one).
So, clue train manifesto for online advertisers:
1) DO! NOT! INTERRUPT! ME! If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
2) Do not ever randomly resize or refresh my web page. It needs to load once AND STAY THERE. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
3) Do not include noise in your ads, if possible. If necessary, make sure I have to work to consciously turn it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
4) Do NOT use bandwidth sucking video unless I request it by consciously turning it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
5) DO NOT ASK IF I WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP, RECEIVE YOUR NEWSLETTER, OR ALERTS BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO SEE THE DAMN PAGE.
Seriously guys. Basic reasoning? How the hell would I know if I want anything to do with you ever again if I haven't even looked you over yet?
The more I see the results of web advertising, I wonder if they lobotomize the ad designers before, or after they are hired. Hire a UI specialist. Hire a psychologist. Most of all, pull your heads out of your own self absorbed asses and actually *talk* to a customer now and then.
Re:It's arms race (Score:5, Informative)
Current blockers are only partially domain based, though that's the larger part. AdBlock & friends can also block based on HTML DOM ID's, classes, paths, etc.
Even if the ads are served by proxy through the origin site's domain, they're going to be in a defined place in the layout. AdBlock can block things like:
div[id='ad']
div/span[class='whatever']/p/img
I haven't found an ad yet that isn't susceptible to being blocked via DOM attributes.
Next step would probably be to dynamically perturb the classes & ID's returned in the page, but then the blockers parse the returned HTML, deobfuscating it in such a way as to give you consistent tokenized identifiers which are then blocked.
Arms race yes, but already predictable domains aren't a requirement for effective blocking.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah have you seen yahoo news lately? its exactly like that.
However more people comment on yahoo news than anywhere else i've found.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is Yahoo jumped the shark a long time ago.
History of Google search page vs Yahoo Portal crap
http://praveenrajan.com/blog/u... [praveenrajan.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Which means that people will instead stop visiting the primary content altogether. Treat your visitors as scum and they'll treat you as scum.
Re: (Score:2)
"Brand New Sucker", Jonathan Coulton?
Re: (Score:2)
It will kill the internet as we know it. Only those entities with money will be able to post any content. Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
Yeah, because the Internet didn't exist before ads.
Lots of sites will die. Those will be the sites that exist to serve ads, rather than do something people are willing to pay for.
Re:End of the internet (Score:4, Interesting)
It will kill the internet as we know it.
Somewhat of an overstatement, but I suppose it will bring about changes.
Only those entities with money will be able to post any content.
Dead wrong. I pay $120 a year for my site hosting and $10 a year for the domain. You can do it for free actually, I just like having big mysql databases and cron jobs.
Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
No, sites will move toward self-hosted ads and rely less on ad networks. It will probably give rise to a new industry of ad brokering for smaller sites unable to find their own advertisers, replacing the current ad+malware delivery networks.
Re: (Score:3)
One of the great things about Microsoft being in catchup mode is that you can pretty much bet that, by the time they start doing something, it will be on the way out.
Now they've pushed all the user tracking and ad-serving crap into Windows, the advertising bubble is probably about to burst.